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There's a lot of strange stuff going on. I've had to come to another machine to post at all as blogger has taken against the other one, or at least pretends to be universally unavailable.

Something is repeatedly identifying me as a spam bot, but I'm dashed if I can find out what it is. Security software shows no infections.

At 8.20 Iceni Standard Time this morning there was a frightful squall which did its best to tip over the dustbins and pull up ornamental arches. Having rampaged though the garden like a drunk on Saturday night, it rumbled away as suddenly as it came.

If the hurricane season is starting early that will be a nuisance because the trees are still carrying heavy leaf. That means they will be more damaged than they would if the leaves had already fallen.

Also, we have a fine stand of horse chestnut trees by a pleasant development of sheltered housing. The wind comes, the conkers hurtle down and frighten the pensioners by rattling their windows and sometimes managing to hit them as they go to the shops.

It brings on arguments about whether the trees should be cut down. It doesn't help that some of our children are unusually dim and throw not just small sticks up there, but ruddy great planks which come down and bonk them on the head. You would think gravity had stopped applying as a fundamental force of the universe to watch them.

Then everybody else blames the trees for having conkers, too.

In between the tree-huggers and the elfin safety zealots it is pretty miserable.

Iceni Standard Time - I like to tip my hat to the people who last negotiated robustly with Rome in about 43AD. The famous leader of the Iceni was Boudicca, a woman perfectly capable of declaring it to be the same hour over all of East Anglia. She didn't actually rule over the whole area, but she put together a credible coalition of tribes which made life much more difficult for Rome.

It is only fair to mention that while the Iceni were keen on things like 'breakfast time' 'dinner time' and 'bed time', had an accurate calendar and - probably - workable freetrade routes all the way to China, they might not have bothered much with sundials.

I'm sorry to say that in the late 7th Century, no matter what other wonderful things Bede did, he sold that calendar out to Rome and helped replace the uniquely Briton and Celtic vision of Christianity - a very personal form of the religion - with a much more centralized, Romanized form.

The calendar was the issue because there were different ways of calculating when Easter fell. Sounds trivial but is not because it enshrines whose word is law.

The tension between Britain and a power centralized in Europe is far from new. Some people try to argue that this shows how the natural order is rule from Europe. I think it shows exactly the opposite; it is natural for Europe to try it on and equally natural for Britain to tell them 'no thank you'.

The European ideal is only ever endorsed by a small class of Brits. They tend to be high caste and wield disproportionate power and be utterly convinced they know what is best for everyone else, like that unpleasant liar Dennis Healey.